Thomas Cromwell

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

  The next way I thought was to find one out

  That Cromwell trusted and of his counsel were;

  As God would have it, such a one I found,

  My secret friend and of old acquaintance;

  There was no evil that against me could sound

  But thereof I had true intelligence.

  And Cromwell thought him my mortal enemy –

  The more loved him above all other;

  And on my part, I shewed not contrary –

  Yet we were friends as brother and brother.69

  It is difficult to decide whether Wriothesley or Bonner is the better candidate for this traitor. The treachery would include revealing the two stories of Cromwell’s rash private pronouncements which were rehearsed in his attainder. Wriothesley is the more likely to have been present, and was certainly of Gardiner’s ‘old acquaintance’, but Bonner would not have been far behind.

  These revelations were only part of the poison. Evidently the King was convinced that Cromwell had been indiscreet about his sexual performance, beyond the royal permission to confide in the Earl of Southampton. Here was the fatal opportunity to alter course once more. In the next two or three days those determined to foil the spreading evangelical coup said the right things to the King to achieve the desired result. The psychology with Henry was to find an oblique reason why he should feel savage fury with a victim, to fuel his self-righteousness and draw attention away from his own sense of humiliation. With Anne, it had been the notion that she had committed the crimes of adultery with all and sundry, and incest with her own brother. With Cromwell, the obvious (and in fact accurate) direction was religion: his constant private initiatives, often amounting to deception of his prince, which could be construed as heresy. Maybe, in Henry’s final rage against his great minister, casting around for pretexts to hate Cromwell, he was fed enough clues about the various exchange visits of young evangelicals to Zürich to realize that the Lord Privy Seal had stealthily aided English ‘sacramentaries’ to roam highly suspect regions of Europe. If so, the King had good reason to execute Cromwell as a heretic: much more than with the accompanying charges of treason.

  Just as with Bishop Sampson, the arrest on Thursday 10 June represented a total reverse of fortune. Cromwell and Cranmer are among those recorded as present in the Lords that morning. In the afternoon, the Lord Privy Seal arrived still dressed formally as for Parliament to find the majority of his colleagues already assembled, with the choreography of the event worked out between them. Our best description comes from Ambassador Marillac’s account to Constable Montmorency, polished after a fortnight of careful enquiry.70 The Captain of the Guard told Cromwell that he was a prisoner:

  Cromwell in a rage ripped his cap from his head and threw it to the ground in contempt, saying to the Duke of Norfolk and others of the Privy Council assembled there that this was the reward of the good service he had done to the King, and that he appealed to their consciences to know whether he was a traitor as in their accusations; he added that since he was thus treated, he renounced all pardon and grace that he might be offered, as one who had never thought to have offended, and only asked the King his master if he had such an opinion of him, not to make him linger long.

  It was a moment for furious recriminations: among those who called him traitor, some sarcastically reminded him of his own legislation on treason, and inevitably the Duke of Norfolk led the way in humiliating him, ripping the collar of St George from his neck, while Admiral Southampton, ‘to show himself as great an enemy in adversity as he had been considered a friend in prosperity’, untied his Garter decoration. From there an unobtrusive barge took him from a palace watergate downstream to the Tower of London. The first that the capital knew of his fate was the sight of Sir Thomas Cheyney and the royal guard arriving at Austin Friars to inventory his goods.

  Back in the Council chamber, the Privy Council busily sent off letters to ambassadors and to the various regional Councils and Ireland, explaining what had happened. Wriothesley did the drafting; it was after all his job, but also his insurance policy. The letters showed how carefully the conspirators had drawn up their plans, because they anticipated material in the eventual Act of Attainder, including the anecdote about Cromwell’s furious words at the time of Robert Barnes’s imprisonment (that was not good news for Barnes either). They concentrated on Cromwell’s ‘oultrage’, that is, his mad behaviour, and his subversion of the King’s constant quest for ‘the mean indifferent, true and virtuous way’.71 Speed was of the essence to make this counter-coup work: Ambassador Pate in Brussels received his copy of the letter (the contents of which utterly delighted him) as soon as Sunday the 13th.

  The signs are that current English embassies abroad had been carefully weighted by Cromwell’s opponents at Court towards those who would welcome the news. Foreign affairs, as we have seen, were always Cromwell’s Achilles heel. Sir John Wallop, English ambassador in France, had been Cromwell’s enemy since the 1520s. In April Ambassador Pate, who defected to Rome the following year before becoming a papalist bishop, replaced Cromwell’s evangelical protégé Thomas Wyatt at the imperial Court – so that decision was made during the conservative offensive in March. It is revealing that on 16 June Pate addressed what was formally a reply to the whole Privy Council to the Duke of Norfolk alone.72 King François of France wrote to Marillac expressing his satisfaction, revealingly observing that his ‘cousin’ Norfolk would be able to tell him about their conversation during his recent embassy on the prospect of getting rid of Cromwell.73

  Wallop was punctilious in promptly feeding back to the King the various damaging reports of Cromwell circulating in foreign Courts: the fallen minister had wished to make himself king, and marry the Lady Mary. Anything discreditable, particularly mood-music about threats to the dynasty, could help to buoy up Henry’s level of hatred. Abstracts survive of the ambassadors’ letters and French commentary on events, summarized for the King’s benefit and Cromwell’s further damnation (alas in the hand of Ralph Sadler, doing his job as Secretary like Wriothesley).74 Marillac noted that those searching Cromwell’s papers promptly cherrypicked his correspondence with Schmalkaldic princes, and that the King was particularly infuriated by their content: with some justification, since Cromwell had indeed consistently negotiated beyond his brief without his master’s knowledge.75

  A fascinating study could be made of the marks on Cromwell’s surviving papers showing how they were scrutinized and annotated when seized in 1540. I have suggested that the household committed an act of loyal destructive vandalism on the out-tray files before royal commissioners could remove them, but plenty remained. Besides that, a formidable armoury was stored at Austin Friars, of which the inventory at confiscation survives: 400 pikes, 759 bows, 459 bills, 272 handguns and armour for more than 600 men, which explains how Cromwell could put up such an impressive show at the great City muster of 1539, and reminds us of his formidable contribution to the forces marching against the Pilgrimage of Grace three years before.76 There was no secret: in 1539 Cromwell boasted to the King of intimidating Ambassador Marillac with a tour of his armoury, during which he had made the point that twenty other lords or gentlemen could have done the same. His military resources were not a problem while Henry favoured his minister; they were fuel for paranoia when paranoia had already been stirred.77

  In such circumstances, who would stand up for the fallen minister? Countless people on receiving favours over the last decade had expansively promised to recompense his goodness if it were in their little power; none came forward now.78 There were honourable reasons not to. With the triple arrests of Lisle, Cromwell and finally Lord Leonard Grey, large swathes of the King’s dominions under lieutenancy were formally leaderless; this was no time to add to destabilization. The remaining provincial governors were Cromwell’s two bishops, Roland Lee and Robert Holgate in the Welsh Marches and the North respectively, together with his friend Lord
Russell as absentee head of the very recently created Council in the West; they all needed to get on with their job. One man alone had the courage to be a voice of reason, just as when Anne Boleyn lay helpless in the Tower: Archbishop Cranmer.

  Either the day after Cromwell’s arrest or at that very meeting, Cranmer heard at the Privy Council table that Cromwell was a traitor, and next day he wrote to the King in the prisoner’s defence. We have only part of the text, printed by Lord Herbert probably from State Papers lost a century later in a fire among manuscripts at Westminster, but it is so like Cranmer’s tormented defence of Anne Boleyn four years before that he may well have got out his 1536 files to find a model of how to write on behalf of a fallen patron and friend to whom he was devoted. The same three elements are there: warm praise of the victim, horror if the charges proved true and pastoral concern for the King in the loss of a brilliant adviser:

  who cannot be sorrowful and amazed that he should be a traitor against your Majesty, he that was so advanced by your Majesty, he whose surety was only by your Majesty, he who loved your Majesty (as I ever thought) no less than God; he who studied always to set forwards whatsoever was your Majesty’s will and pleasure; he that cared for no man’s displeasure to serve your Majesty; he that was such a servant, in my judgement, in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness, and experience, as no prince in this realm ever had . . .

  Cranmer turned adroitly to the theme of treason, starting with that recently rehabilitated evangelical hero of the English monarchy’s struggle with the Papacy:

  If the noble princes of memory, King John, Henry II and Richard II had had such a Councillor about them, I suppose they should never have been so traitorously abandoned, and overthrown as those good princes were . . . I loved him as my friend, for so I took him to be; but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards your Grace, singularly above all other. But now, if he be a traitor, I am sorry that ever I loved him or trusted him, and I am very glad that his treason is discovered in time; but yet again I am very sorrowful; for who shall your Grace trust hereafter, if you might not trust him? . . . But I pray God continually night and day, to send such a counsellor in his place whom your grace may trust, and who for all his qualities can and will serve your Grace like to him.79

  This was an astonishingly brave letter to write, given Cranmer’s own danger. He was on his own, for the first time since becoming Archbishop, without the protection of the hard-nosed operator always able to deal with political crises. In 1563 John Foxe printed a plausible story in Acts and Monuments about the Archbishop’s peril at this time, which he may later have considered indecorous, and dropped from later editions. Cranmer was due for arrest, but he avoided a group waiting to buttonhole him at ‘the common stairs of Court Gate’ in Whitehall when he ‘suddenly shot into the privy stair’ (the private stair to the royal apartments) to see the King in person. The King gave Cranmer his signet-ring, with a rather typical Henrician anti-clerical growl, ‘Go thy ways; if thou deceive me, I will never trust bald-pate again while I live.’ The signet was Henry’s favourite device for lending his authority to protect his intimates: a talisman to preserve Cranmer, just as in a renewed attempt to destroy him in 1543.80

  Cranmer could do nothing else for Cromwell, any more than for Anne Boleyn. He took his place in the Lords, absenting himself from the deliberations only one day that month, and dutifully voted through the first reading of Cromwell’s attainder on 19 June with everyone else.81 The attainder charges, only finally decided on 29 June after some tinkerings, focused on treason and heresy: in the sardonic words of Lord Herbert a century later, ‘that the Head of the Church’s Vicegerent in Spiritual Affairs should be an heretic and favourer of them, to some seemed strange, to others gave occasion of merriment.’82 By that Act, Cromwell was legally dead: useful to the King only for what evidence he could provide to bolster Henry’s arguments about the nullity of the Anne of Cleves marriage, hastening yet another royal wedding. The delicate task of annulment was launched on 5 July, and was thereafter a brisk minuet round Parliament and the two Convocations of the kingdom.83 Queen Anne, utterly shocked at first on being told what was afoot, soon proved heroically resilient at the prospect of not being married to Henry VIII. She took a handsome settlement of English estates from her relieved non-husband, and concentrated very happily on not being married to anyone for another seventeen years of life, generally esteemed by those who remembered her, from Queen Mary downwards.84

  Once one marriage was safely ended and another in sight, Cromwell could be taken from his cell in the Tower and disposed of. The vital task for Norfolk, Gardiner and others was to stop him having the face-to-face contact with Henry that twice saved Cranmer, and might have broken the spell of the King’s malice. All he was allowed to do was to write a series of detailed letters contributing what he could to the pile of evidence. They do everything possible to remind the King of his good service in government: ‘I am a right simple man to be a witness in this matter, but yet I think next your Grace, I know as much as any one man living in this realm doth.’85 It was perhaps more true than tactful to point out the perils of being an indispensable minister: ‘hard it is for me or any other, meddling as I have done, to live under your Grace and your laws, but we must daily offend.’86

  Interspersed among the testimony were pleas for the Cromwell family: ‘I most humbly beseech your gracious Majesty [to be] good and gracious lord to my poor son, the good and virtuous [Lady] his wife and their poor children.’87 One letter was used formally as evidence in the ecclesiastical judgment of annulment, and hence a copy survives in a logical but still surprising place: transcribed with extreme accuracy by a notary into the archive of the Archbishop of York, whose Convocation needed to add assent to the annulment proceedings.* The York notary was extremely thorough. Heart-stoppingly, he included Cromwell’s postscript to the King: ‘Most gracious prince: I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!’ One wonders whether Henry was given the chance to hear these letters read out to him verbatim.88

  On the day of Cromwell’s execution, 28 July 1540, the King took his mind off it by getting married to Katherine Howard. One doubts whether he reflected on his previous diversion with a young lady while disposing of Anne Boleyn. Just as in Anne’s case, Cromwell could with full legal propriety have been burned at the stake, and maybe his enemies sought that. In July Parliament enacted a general pardon; in itself that was a customary piece of routine to sort out various legal liabilities for officials and private individuals, but this contained some extraordinary provisions. Not only was Cromwell of course among those excluded by name from pardon, but the exclusions were widened from merely ‘sacramentarians’ (a heresy of which Cromwell was attainted): a proviso added by the Lords on 9 July tacked on a carefully specified set of eight radical beliefs, all of which characterized supposed Anabaptists. That suggests smear tactics aimed at increasing the noise-levels about heresy around the fallen minister.89 Yet, as in 1536, Henry drew back from a degree of frightfulness: the Earl of Essex would die by simple beheading, which might indicate that the King was once more beginning to think of him as a peer of the realm, rather than as Thomas Cromwell, shearman. That was the mercy which emerged from Cromwell’s pleading postscript.

  He was brought from his cell to the scaffold on Tower Hill. Beside him in death was Walter Lord Hungerford. This relatively minor nobleman’s fate was connected to Cromwell’s because he undertook administrative tasks for the Lord Privy Seal in his West Country homeland, and because he provided discredit by association. His arrest seems to have arisen out of traditionalist remarks about the King by his chaplain, but investigation triggered a wave of lurid accusations against Hungerford himself which at the very least showed what a dysfunctional life he led, not for the first time in the Hungerford family: a spectrum of wife-beating, incest and buggery, sickening if even half true. It was the last charge that ensured Hungerford’s execution, under a statute Cromwell himself had steered throug
h Parliament in earlier years. All this distracted usefully from the initial charges against Hungerford’s chaplain, which suggests that the wretched peer may actually have been arrested in the course of the Lord Privy Seal’s normal round of scenting out conservative religious dissidence. Hungerford did not die gracefully or with tranquillity: ‘at the hour of his death [he] seemed unquiet, as many judged him rather in a frenzy than otherwise,’ one chronicler observed.90

  By contrast, Cromwell was the model of control. His duty, customary for prominent condemned people, was to make an appropriate speech expressing repentance and saying something about the offence for which he was dying.91 Unless one had nothing to lose, the limits on what could be said were considerable. Cromwell was conscious of performing a last service for his much loved son and grandchildren, to distance them from his own attainder and give the King reason to look well on them in the future. So he chose his words carefully, though actually giving no ground to his enemies. Yes, he had lived a sinner – but have not we all under Christian teaching? – ‘and it is not unknown to many of you that I have been a great traveller in this world, and being but of a base degree, was called to high estate, and sithence the time I came thereunto, I have offended my prince.’ All statements of fact.

  Given the heresy charges against him, the most important task was to protect his family by being precise in refuting the charge. ‘And now I pray you that be here, to bear me record, I die in the Catholic faith, not doubting in any article of my faith, no, nor doubting in any sacrament of the Church.’ He repeated that he died in the Catholic faith of the holy Church. The Tower official Anthony Anthony’s slight expansion of the chronicler Edward Hall’s version of his speech made him say ambiguously, ‘I intend this day to die God’s servant,’ and recorded a remark more precise than Hall: ‘I believe in the laws ordained by the Catholic Church.’ Yet no one was to say what he actually believed by all that, or indeed how many sacraments of the Church he was affirming; any mainstream Protestant could make exactly the same affirmations. The overriding concern was to distance himself very precisely from the Anabaptism with which his foes wished to associate him. Of course he prayed for the King and his son Prince Edward, ‘that godly imp’, and ended with a substantial prayer committing his soul to God.